Final Remarks

Abstract

This year we have to celebrate the 50 anniversary of the book “The structure of the scientific revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn that has been published in 1963.. In this book, the more influential science philosopher of the last century, changed the old view of the development of the natural sciences as a linear process accumulation of knowledge into a substantially discontinuous passage from one paradigm to a new one. Two drastic changes of paradigm occurred near the beginning of last centuries with the shift from Newton’s absolute time to relativistic space-time and from Laplace determinism to quantum mechanics. Around the middle of the same century another crucial shift of paradigm was the introduction of Gauge Symmetries, that led to the formulation of the Standard Model of Electromagnetic, Weak and Strong interactions (SM for brief) [1], whose complete experimental verification has been given recently by LHC [2, 3]. The carriers of those three forces are spin-1 particles, namely the photon for the electromagnetic, the gluon for the strong and the W±,Z for the weak one. It is well known that the first two particles are massless, while the others, that were discovered at LEP. have large masses (∼ 80− 90 times the mass of the proton), which can explain the weakness of the corresponding interactions. Since the SM does not include gravity, there is no hint in it for the mass of the particles, that are put “by hand” in the Lagrangian. What is now usually called the “Higgs mechanism” [4, 5] is the possibility that the mass of particles, in particular that of the weak bosons, could be originated by the coupling with a universal scalar field, which carriers would be a weakly interacting spin-0 particles very similar to the one recently observed at LHC. Nevertheless even a confirmed discovery of the Higgs would not be the end of the story, because thanks to Astronomy and Cosmology, we have strong observational evidences for phenomena like